Google DFP

[Norri]

Dave, I know you've got some experience with Google DFP. I'm looking at switching to something more powerful for ad-serving on GuitarForum.co.za, is DFP the way to go? Is it easy to manage and learn?

I'd need my salespeople to be able to easily work with it as well as me and my partner. We're both pretty tech-friendly but I worry about sales-folk being able to easily manage ads of our clients.

Your thoughts? Anyone else who has experience with DFP?

[Dave A]

Norri, it's brilliant!
And reliable.

If you go with a simple set-up it's also dead easy to use. I'm sure you won't have any problems at all, but if you do get stuck anywhere you know where to ask

More complex setups can be a little more complicated, but the power is there to do the most amazing ad management tasks. Just takes some thought and planning.
It really does have all the tools.

[Norri]

Thanks for the confirmation I'm going to dive in this weekend! Wish me luck!

[Citizen X]

Wishing you everything of the best in your new endevour!

[jasonpat]

Well this is such a impressing fact that you work in google.

[Norri]

Dave, we've switched to DFP and so now I want to take you up on your offer of support

- What setup are you running here? All in-house ads, or did you do something different?
- What's the EASIEST way to just set up all banners to rotate evenly?

We have monthly "sponsorship" sort of pricing, so there's really no need for the fancier CPM/CPC stuff right now. All we want is to be able to add a banner and have it rotate but, in my efforts to do so, I find myself having to modify existing orders to change the percentage of impressions they should receive. Surely there's an easier way?

Thanks for whatever help you can offer. I have read through the DFP getting started guide but it didn't really answer this for me. Happy to read more if you can point me in the right direction.

[Dave A]

I'm going for the quick reply to get you going.

- What's the EASIEST way to just set up all banners to rotate evenly?

Assuming you have no competing campaigns for the ad location/s you're using for banner rotation -

Set up an in-house ad campaign.
Add all the creatives onto this campaign and set them to rotate evenly or with even weighting.

[Norri]

Thanks meneer

Just after posting, I found some info on how DFP serves ads. (I should have done that first, I know, but at least this way the whole TFSA community benefits from the answers I found :P)

Basically they recommend setting all the ads as "Sponsorship" priority. That is apparently the highest priority and if they're all set the same, they'll rotate evenly. Our issue was that we had 1 paying client on "Sponsorship" and our own in-house ad on "House". The "House" ads are the lowest priority so they never showed until I reduced the percentage of impressions for the client's ad to 50%.

So now the question is: Do I set up a dummy company for our in-house ads so we can have our ads competing on even footing with our client's or do I move them all to in-house, with the same effect. I'm thinking of doing the former as it (I believe) makes it possible for us to easily share the reports with our clients - something which I think is important.

The other option, which I haven't investigated yet, is to simply set our own ads as priority "Sponsorship". I'm not sure if that's possible: To have a house ad (under the house company) and still have a non-house priority. THAT would win first prize. Time for me to check if it's possible!

[Norri]

Oh yippee, it's possible

[Dave A]

When it comes to DFP, I think almost anything is possible

[Dave A]

- What setup are you running here? All in-house ads, or did you do something different?

Currently I'm only managing the top right hand banner location via DFP, and that's to facilitate the Silver Club program.

As "excess stock" goes to Adsense, I just have to set an impression goal and CPM value for each silver club order to get it to do what I want.

If there are any "tricks" I've learned in this setup, they would be:

• Set a reasonable CPM value. I've found the historical average Adsense (CPM value + 20%) for the ad location works quite well as a starting point.
• If you have other Adsense locations using Adsense directly, use the Google Publisher Tag (asynchronous) code.

A couple of years ago I had a far more complex set-up where all the ad locations were managed via DFP. This is not particularly difficult to set up if you have the same number and mix of ad sizes coming up on every page. But it gets really tricky in a forum site set-up where typically you'll have more ad locations or a different mix of ad sizes in a thread page than you want in other pages.

[Norri]

Thanks for the advice Much appreciated!